March 24, 1963 lecture at The Baltimore Museum of Art by art critic Leo Steinberg entitled "Ironies of Realism". The lecture was sponsored by the Museum's Women's Committee. The recorded material ends abruptly, and does not include a conclusion from Steinberg.

Transcript

Interviewer:
I'm starting with two images, the one on the left (inaudible 0:07- 0:11) is a drawing by Leo Steinberg who is an admired friend of mine but no relation (0:17 inaudible) book called the Labyrinth. The one on the right is one of the most famous paintings in the history of art. It is The Expulsion from Paradise, very apt, but unrehearsed, by Masaccio. It was painted in a Florentine church around 1427. It is a particularly well known painting.
I am looking because, Mr. Myers I am still wondering if we are entirely in focus. Is it clear? Thank you very much.
This painting is one that is familiar to anyone who has to take an Art History course at college and I in fact (1:02 inaudible _ a course) in the history of art of particular design by showing this picture and asking the kind of question which always strikes the undergraduate student as a silly question, which I could only ask for the obvious, I said, what do you see? And there was one forward girl in the front row who shrugged her shoulders and said two unhappy people.
Now if I take that kind of (inaudible 1:22) and apply it to the fourth numbered drawing on the left, I would say what do you see? We see two smiling people. And if you wanted to extend this kind of analysis (1:32 inaudible) the kind of people shown in each depicted picture, you would say that, ah, it doesn't really matter where you begin, it strikes me that in the Masaccio the man and the woman suffer individually whereas in the Steinberg drawing they smile in happy unison.
It strikes me that the Masaccio figures display a heroic capacity for suffering, whereas the Steinberg figures display if anything a sort of timid hope that they will be liked and they will be asked to your party if they don't stay too long. The Masaccio Adam expresses a sort of varied interned misery whereas the Adam of Saul Steinberg displays a sort of silly extroverted glee. And so you could go on drawing analogies or making differences and I think probably the characters drawn by Steinberg are as damned as those of Masaccio but they don't know it.
But all this analysis remains somewhat naive because it talks about the figures that are presented in these two pictures as though they were two people. And this is naive because after all they are not real people they are essentially paintings. They are essentially rendered and they are something made, made by one artist and therefore they are made in a certain way.
Now, if one looks a little longer at the Steinberg, one notices there is a very striking way in which these people are made. They are made very carefully by the very careful delineation of the shape of shadows. There are no contours. Certain limbs which might have not cast any strong shadows like the lady's arms or the top of the man's head have simply disappeared and the whole figure is expressed through nothing more but the shape of cast or direct shadows.
You see for instance the lapel, the right lapel of the man, or the separation between the two parts of his jacket. So this is a very distinct way of making. And if you look at the Masaccio a little longer you will find that there too there are some very distinct ways in which the thing is made and to which Masaccio seems to be drawing attention. There is for instance the motif of the arch. Adam and Eve have just cleared the arch of the gateway, the gateway of paradise and their heads are still inclined towards each other as if echoing the arch they have just cleared. And in case you don't quite get the point he has disposed the arms of the angel above as a sort of bracket, he brackets them together.
The sight of two unhappy people is obviously too much for one member of the audience already. (laughter)
But this repetition, the continuity of the Arch motif is so deliberate that one begins to suspect that this painting by Masaccio is related to reality as perhaps a rhymed poem would be related to a stenographic record of an eyewitness report.
This kind of rhyming continues quite significantly. I notice for instance, that Adam is all closed up at the top and wide open at the bottom (4:37 inaudible) whereas Eve does exactly the reverse. She is wide open at the top, throwing her head back and her mouth opened wide and then where her legs cross she is closed.
So you get that these cross rhythms which turn it into a kind of rhymed poem effect.
Now the interesting thing is that the way in which these pictures are made reflect upon the characters that present them. Now in the case of Masaccio. Well let me start with Steinberg. In the case of the Steinberg the fact they are made of shadows only, Steinberg himself once said to me he felt these people made up of only shadows really had no soul, and that's his subject. And I could add to it that they give the suggestion of being under strong electric light, strong artificial light. So lacking contours, lacking any real sense of stability or monumental mass, tangibility, you have a feeling of something very fleeting, transient, (5:33 inaudible) in a sense insignificant which is really quite the opposite, even though they are standing still. Where in the Masaccio the way in which he rendered them and illuminated them gives them a kind of monumental endurance even though they seem to sliding out of the picture. Furthermore you notice that in the Masaccio the man and the woman respond very differently to their identical predicaments. They are both cast out of paradise but the man seems to respond with a sort of moral contrition and intellectual shame whereas the woman responds with an almost animal howl and a sort of sharpened awareness of body. And all this is expressed through these same formal devices and rhymes which I just started to indicate.
So on these two levels, first the level of treating them as if they were human beings, real people, there is a certain amount to be seen, and then if one goes on and studies them from the point of view of how they were made as pictures one finds that the method of making reflects upon their character as people so that they interact subject and method.
Now there is a third level to which one can go if one looks a little longer. The Steinberg method is not simply an invention of his own, it is not simply a whim to render his characters by use of (6:53 inaudible shadows?) alone, it seems to refer to something that is very familiar in our visual environment. It refers to a certain mechanical mode of reproduction, for instance wire photos or overexposed snapshots which are then reproduced on sheets of paper such as ordinary newsprint where all the half tones will disappear and only the large masses of shadow will remain.
I think it is possible that Steinberg is punning on the word cliche which in European languages is the word for a cut or a block from which you print the picture. In French for instance we call it cliche. So what he has really done is he has made a picture not just of a man and a woman but he has made a picture of a cliche. He has made a picture of a kind of representation of a certain kind of ephemeral standardized mass circulation image which we all see around us all the time, which has very little to do with art. It is this image part of our visual environment which he has taken the trouble to represent or to allude to. So that you may say Steinberg's image represents an existing type of representation. And this too of course affects the content of the picture because in some way at least I get the feeling that the people represented are also a standardized commodity as that kind of reproductive process produces a standardized commodity.
So the longer you look at the picture the more clearly you observe that it is made in a certain way. And the more sharply you understand the way in which it was made, the more you realize, the more you recognize that it is a representation of a type of picture.
Now in the Steinberg drawing it seems to me to be almost self evident for the simple reason that the kind of picture which is eluded to in it, is something that we are familiar with and furthermore it doesn't require any special research to determine whether Saul Steinberg was familiar with over exposed snapshots or had ever seen photographs reproduced in the newspaper. We assume that his culture sufficiently like ours, for him to be familiar with it.
Now I would like to suggest this as one of the essential differences between an art historian and a layman in the way they look upon art. The art historian is simply a man who tries to see the Masaccio too with a kind of effortless awareness of the kind of images that Masaccio was familiar with. So that using this kind of awareness he would discover that the Masaccio also is not simply two people, two unhappy people, nor is it simply two unhappy people but rendered in a remarkably rhyming formalized composition or dramatically effective composition, but that it also alludes to a kind of image which preexists his own image. For one thing with the man striding out and Eve's legs crossed. This is simply a reenactment of an ancient Mediterranean type or representation where always a woman is shown either with her legs together or slightly crossed and the man is always shown through Egyptian and Greek art striding out as a symbol of masculine self assertion and space. But beyond that one can become much more specific.
About 35 or 40 years ago a French Masaccio specialist published a remarkable article about this picture and he posed this question, whether the action of Eve in this picture was indeed something that Masaccio could ever have observed and he came to the logical conclusion that it is not something that he had observed but rather something which he had copied from a very familiar antique type. And the type is of course that of the so called Modus Venus.
Now this scholar (10:56 Zachmaniel) said that to prove that the Masaccio painting is an imitation and not simply a coincidence we must establish first that the gesture is not a natural one, and therefore easily observable and second that Masaccio knew a classical statue of this type. Now he proved that Masaccio did know a classical statue of this type.
And then he says it is clear that the gesture of this Venus Pudica, the Modus Venus as this (11:21 ? ) is called, it is clear that her gesture is not that of natural and spontaneous modesty, nor one that is frequently seen in life. Then he received an interesting bit of research, he has read a German scholar by the name of Dr. Stratz? (11:34) who had written an extensive work on woman's (breasts? Risks? 11:37) and he says as Dr Stratz has just noted the more natural gesture for a woman taken by surprise is to cross the arms and press the limbs together. The movement of the Modus Venus is a studied gesture, symbolical of modesty rather than portraying it realistically.
Now what does this mean is really Masaccio has not rendered this thing in any realistic sense but has invoked a famous statue type so that we are invited one way or another to (12:07 think art?) as we look at this picture, even while he gives a highly dramatic and highly realistic account of a biblical incident, he builds in a kind of quotation which compels us to think art rather than reality.
Now (12:26 Zachmaniel?) who made this discovery was referring to this gesture as studied and symbolic. What he did not know, or at least failed to mention was that some thirty years before that another French scholar had observed that the gesture of the Modus Venus, the Hellenistic type, ultimately going back to (12:41 name? Praxipolis?) said her gesture itself was not an original observation from nature but that it's derived from much earlier figures, fertility statuettes of the archaic period, which are known all through the Mediterranean and where the hands addressed to the sources of potency express a kind of primitive awe of the magic of fertility. And what happens in the Hellenistic statue is that the primitive awe of fertility is civilized into an admiration for good breeding and that Venus simply becomes a modest lady making this studied gesture.
Now, what we have then is a gesture of primitive natural power, civilized into that of the Modus Venus, dramatized by Masaccio into an expression of immediate anguish and shame and then spiritualized by Rafael in the picture on the right representing St Catherine into the closest you can come to a gesture expressive of sainthood because her right arm now falls over her breast in an indication of profound devotion or inward experience. Her left arm rests almost tenderly on the instrument of her martyrdom the wheel on which she was martyred. And so as a sinner may become a saint, so even this gesture may become redeemed.
But just as obviously I think if you look at the Rafael, the gesture here is not only a gesture of sainthood it is also a gesture by means of which Rafael maintains a continually spiraling and circulating system of energy. There is a definite (14:21 _sense?) of energy on the right side of the picture, emphasized by the turning of the wheel, her left thigh and then the ochre sash that runs about her hip, ascending on that side, circulating in a manner quite familiar for many painters, paintings by (Sussan? Name?) and others which will employ similar kind of circulation and quite clearly the gesture of the arm contributes quite significantly to the maintaining of the purely abstract energy through the pictorial scheme.
As a human gesture it is also self consciously rhythmic, it is almost a ballet gesture. So one gets the sensation that in addition to being a gesture of sainthood the sincerity of which may be questioned, it is very largely a gesture reelecting a sort of familiar choreography, familiar in art. In other words the gesture has in fact become art. And it is as art entirely as a deliberate quotation or reference to an existing representational type that the gesture now keeps recurring throughout the 16th century, appropriate to Eve and to Venus and the Madonna alike. As for instance in a famous painting by Parmigianino, datable about 1530 about 20 years later than the Rafael.
Now this picture, the painting called The Madonna della Rosa, virgin of the rose, of a rose which the Christ child holds up, is a very disturbing picture to modern or perhaps any sensibilities. It is a picture of such decadent aristocratic sensuality and obvious eroticism that we don't really know quite where to file it. And of course Parmigianino knew this and it is part of his kind of mannerist twist, the anti classical twist that all apparent values of sanctity and sensuality are in a strange way confounded.
Now we know that the picture on the left is a representation of the Madonna and the Christ child because the Christ child with the strange bracelet on his left arm, the Christ child has his hand on a globe which is only appropriate to Christ, and also (16:31 Wazari) and other writers of the period describe this painting as having been painted of the Madonna and child and then the pope visiting bologna where it happened to be at the time, liked the picture so much that it was presented to him. In other words we are quite sure that it is the Madonna and Child. But there is a drawing which is clearly a study for this picture by Parmigianino in England, in (16:54 Chatsworth?) and this drawing was published and the author, the man who published it, Poppin, has this to say about the drawing in relation to the painting.
Many changes have taken place between the original idea and the painting. It began as the picture of a purely domestic scene of a woman washing her child. The curious and apparently motiveless gesture of the virgin's right arm in the picture is explained as a survival of the mother's perfectly natural action in the drawing. She is rolling up her sleeve to wash the infant.
Now I am a little unconvinced because where Poppin says that her gesture is now explained as a survival from the act in the drawing, which was rolling up her sleeve it is not sufficiently explained because why did the gesture survive? If you eliminated the sleeve and changed the position of the Christ child's leg, you could also have changed the position of the virgin's arm. So I don't think that the (17:48 para-genesis thing ?) explains it. I think however, by the way I like to give an artist credit for what he is doing, and unless I have evidence to the contrary, I think it is useful to assume that an artist creates more the way a writer writes and less the way a bird sings. In other words there is a certain amount of conscious awareness of what he is doing.
Now, the mother washing her child is a very rare theme and would be quite extraordinary in the somewhat decadent aristocratic art of Parmigianino, on the other hand there is a very common, very beloved theme in the period which is the chastisement of Cupid. Cupid being punished, usually with a sprig of rosebush which survives in the rose here, is being punished for his irresponsible use of the bow and arrow.
Now the suggestion of a Venus and Cupid as the original conception for this picture is so overwhelming that a Taylor wrote in the 18th century that in fact there were traces of wings behind the Christ child so that in fact it had been started as a Venus and Cupid, and then when the Pope expressed interest in the picture it was quickly made more respectable by turning it into a Madonna. This is a legend. It is not true. But you can see how a legend like this would arise, because the virgin is so painted as to suggest irresistibly a Venus. And of course Parmigianino knew what he was doing because he placed the arms in such a way that it recalls the ancient gesture which has become simply a hallmark of art.
Now the theology of this may be obscure but the aesthetics is comparatively simple. In his increasing obsession with grace, with a kind of vitreous cold surface beauty, Parmigianino invites comparison, not with women, but with women in art. He by means of his gesture, he compels the knowing connoisseur, to whom of course he addresses this picture, to the latest version to other images. Just as in the Steinberg drawings we were compelled by the kind of method he used, to the latest picture to another kind of image. So, he wants you as you look at it, not merely to look at a kind of woman, but to look at a kind of art.
And I think this becomes rather important when you finally compare this picture - it is the last of these that I will show, although I could have continued with - it would have been very interesting and amusing to follow this motif right through the ages and see it constantly reinterpreted but always giving and assuring the painter a kind of anchorage in art, because it is visibly a quotation.
Now here is a painting by Rubens. Rubens in his fifties had married a beautiful, well he thought she was very beautiful, young girl of 16. Her legs are not to the modern taste but he liked them. And she was 16 years old, Helena Fourment. In the 19th century with its admiration for anything mechanical and therefore with its admiration for mechanical realism, Rubens being admired as obviously a great painter, they delighted in reconstructing the probable occasion for this picture. How Rubens would be sitting in his studio and Helena Fourment on her way to the shower would be passing and Rubens would catch a glimpse of her and would say "hold it" and this is how the picture was born.
Now this is a typical 19th century. You still occasionally find this kind of nonsense repeated. Obviously this picture is a very studied construct. And the difficulty with this kind of interpretation is that the layman tends to relate a painting directly to some kind of life experience. He tends to relate it directly to something the artist probably had seen, thought or felt. Whereas the historian sees a picture as art modified or recreated or rejuvenated by a life experience, by something he thought or felt. But it is always art that is changed by his life experience. It is not simply a life experience which is directly converted into art, in a vacuum so to speak. The historian sees it immediately and I think this is what Rubens wants you to see, or else feels betrayed, despite the naturalism of such a picture, or perhaps because of its extreme naturalism the painting must immediately register as art. It must be ranged mentally with or against other works of art.
Rubens wants you to see not simply his wife, Helena Fourment but Helen's translation into painting into a certain kind of painting highly erotic, freshly observed and yet conceived in art, comparable only to art. And Rubens accomplishes this by at least three ways. First of all by the extraordinary austerity or formality of the general pose. After all she stands there like the Grandmaster of some knightly order in complete regalia and in a very formal picture such as Van Dyke would habitually paint and Rubens himself. So there is this august formality of the arrangement which relates it immediately in the eye of the connoisseur to art.
Secondly, and I have no time to go into this now, the picture is painted as a deliberate homage and challenge to Titian who had also painted a Venus in a fur coat. And thirdly he accomplishes our relating it to art by the reenactment of a ritual gesture, a kind of formula that acts like a sacred charter for the realism and eroticism of his vision.
Now this is simply one case of borrowing but the borrowing of motifs or of method, is absolutely universal in art. Though its meaning varies from case to case. And I would like to show you a few examples of it because they tend to be fairly shocking at times and yet I think they point to something that is at the very heart of art as such.
Here is an example. An early Christian fresco from a catacomb in Rome. A catacomb of San Callisto and it represents scenes from the life of Jonah. And on the extreme left you see Jonah being cast into the water, to lighten the shop, and exposed to the big fish. The big fish rather like a dragon with a very curly tail comes up there. Then you see the big fish again turning this time to the right, spewing Jonah out onto the dry land and on the extreme right you see Jonah under the booth which he had built for himself, over which God had caused the gourd to grow, and Jonah is asleep.
Now how do we know that he is asleep? He might as well be scratching his head and his legs are very twisted. We know he's asleep because that's the way you sleep in art at least in ancient -
(No, sorry, that has to stay on. Yes. And then the one on the left. Thank you. That's it.)
I just show you the famous Ariadne. Now in a case like this, the motif, the way to make people sleep simply carries over rather uningeniously because art to an early Christian painter is a simply functional craft. He is concerned with things very different from artistic expression, or certainly self expression or style, and he is willing to copy the way you make a sleeper in exactly the manner which a carpenter would copy the way to make a table or a bed.
But borrowing can take on very different characters. For instance, the picture on the left is a detail from the Pergamon altar; it is an enormous altar of Zeus, dedicated to Zeus, which was built up on the acropolis of the city of Pergamon in Asia Minor to commemorate a great victory, which the Pergamines (Hellenistic Greeks) around 180BC had won against invading Gauls from the North, barbarians.
Now the whole of this work with its representation of gods defeating the various monsters and giants who represent the forces of volcanic disorders and blizzards and so forth, the battle of the gods and the giants is treated symbolically as the battle for the establishment of an ordered cosmos, under the leadership of Zeus. All of this is done here in a style of exaggerated stress, of violent anatomical overemphasis and a style that is terribly conscious of its staggering modernity. And yet it is filled with deliberate echoes of the kind of stylistic language of long ago.
And if you compare it for instance with a battle scene from a Greek (26:23 vase?) of about 400 BC, in other words well over two centuries older, which must have struck the people of Pergamon as very antique, you will find that on the lower right for instance there was a man, there is an enemy being struck down and he has fallen on his knees, and raises one arm over his head, and that is exactly what you get in a central figure in the Pergamon (theme 26:45) and in the Pergamon relief again, one of the figures spilling off the relief onto the stairs makes the same kind of gesture in reverse that you get one of the fallen warriors making in the lower left of the (Valse/Vase? 26:56) painting. Who was being struck down by Athena. So the whole thing is filled with very deliberate quotations. And we can never be absolutely sure of why this was done. Perhaps it was unconscious. This was what the artist had seen and these forms remained in his head as in the case of the Jonah picture. Perhaps it was a matter of artistic taste or judgment that he felt the more violent his own forms became, the more he relied on some kind of geometric patterning to control his violence.
But there was certainly also a moral and political element that played into it. The great war for the establishment and maintenance of the cosmos had begun with a battle of the gods against the giants, was continued by the men fighting down the centaurs and achieving the superiority of man over the brute creation, was continued in the battle of the Greeks against the Amazons where man established his dominion over woman, continued in a war of the Greeks against the Trojans, and then the Greeks against the Persians where the Greek establishes his superiority over the Adriatic. And now the Pergamines in a battle just fought, just won, want to feel that they are still in the Greek line of battle, they are still fighting a war that had begun with the battle of the gods against the brute forces of nature. And so they want to feel in the Greek line of battle, speaking Greek and giving their art a recognizably Greek accent.
So, the borrowing that goes on in an art form like this is really not so much pilfering or plagiarism, it is a passionate affirmation of kinship. And this is the kind of borrowing that you get repeatedly in contemporary art. When (28:33 Sussan?) expresses his kinship for (28:34 french phrase), and borrows it is done in much the same spirit.
Similarly, if I go back to the renaissance for a moment, and to Masaccio, his most famous fresco is the scene of the (28:47 _ money) Christ being asked for the penny, and ordering Peter on his right to go off to find it.
Now the detail on your left is the face of the St John, the youngest of the apostles, the best beloved of Christ, and he has a very strikingly massive antique face, which has been shown to be derived from antique prototypes.
Now, it appeared to me not long ago, and I haven't had a chance to look into the matter but undoubtedly it has been noticed before, but anyway not by me, it occurred to me recently that Michelangelo's David allowing for the fact that he is looking at an enemy and therefore is frowning, about to draw his sling, allowing for that difference and the benign expression of the St. John, I think it is very strikingly similar head. And here again you may say it was an unconscious memory on the part of the young Michelangelo because he had trained himself by drawing after Masaccio a good deal and therefore these images would have penetrated his mind, and that would mean that he wasn't aware of what he was doing. I obviously reject these interpretations if I can. Another is that it was simply a matter of taste preference. He liked the face so he gave it to his David. You could also say more seriously that it is a sort of aesthetic manifesto on the part of Michelangelo that he links up across two generations of lighter weight painters in Florence, and certainly repudiating his own immediate predecessors, his own teachers like (30:11 name) with their other lightweight decorative art, he links up with the great massive monumental tradition of Masaccio and through him back to (30:18 Giotto?) so that it is an aesthetic cradle that he reestablishes by taking a Masaccio face for the David which is to dominate the city of Florence.
And again there is also a moral and political implication because David was to the Florentines a symbol, David fighting against Goliath was the symbol of the young stalwart Florentine Republic faced with much larger kingdoms in Italy and Europe, and it would be very nice if Michelangelo had chosen to give to young Florence to the Florentine republic the face of Christ's best loved disciple. And incidentally the face to which Masaccio had given an antique cast. So that there is again a kind of aesthetic manifesto involved in linking up with the tradition of the antiques. But if this kind of comparison remains fairly questionable you can still argue that it was done half unconsciously and is not a deliberate attempt to invoke art as you look at David.
I will show you another kind of example. Here is a painting on the left by Francesco Albani of the early 17th century. One of the Bolognese classicists. And it is a picture of Dianna surprised by the hunter Actaeon and he will shortly be turned for her into a stag to be torn to pieces by his own hounds for having peeped on her. Now what I find very amusing is that the girl in the middle is of course a direct quotation of a famous antique Venus, the so called Venus of Syracuse in the Syracuse museum where she is kept and here there is no question of an unconscious borrowing. And certainly the artist did not paint the figure in the middle hoping that you wouldn't notice the similarity. On the contrary he hoped to be complemented on his ingenuity in transplanting an ancient headless and disarmed statue into such a convincing narrative. He has also quoted a very common sarcophagus motif in the lower left. That girl, whom we see from the back with her body running flush along the surface of the picture so to speak, is really a body from a relief sculpture. And he hopes that you will recognize this too so that the space into which he has transplanted her shall not be taken for granted but that you will constantly marvel at the transformation of something that existed flat in a relief, of its transformation into a three dimensional ground
So, as in the Steinberg drawing with which I began, the figure, the one on the lower left not the one in the middle, represents whatever it represents by first representing another kind of figure, another kind of art by referring to an existing type of representation. In other words it is not so much an imitation of life but an animation of statues. You get this sort of witty parade of antique statues come to life.
Now you may protest that Albani is a closet classicist who would do this sort of thing and he is not really a painter of the very first rank. So I will go to another type of painter like Valazquez. Now this unfortunately is a very gloomy slide but as you may know this is one of the most famous paintings in the world and it is the painting by Valazquez who is the prince of realists of a scene, of an event that had occurred a few years previously when the Spaniards were fighting the Dutch. It's called the Surrender of Breda. Now about Valazquez also, people used to tell the kind of story that I tell in connect with Rubens. One English writer on Valazquez so marveled at his absolute relentless realism that he proposed a motto for Valazquez, the man who paints nothing but what is actually there before his eyes. This kind of mechanical realism was most admired then. And he proposed that Valazquez motto should be, (34:06 veni vedi _ ?) I came, I saw, I painted. You know operating exactly like a camera you see, with the shutter clicking.
Now it was quite a shock, and it was a terrible shock for people to discover that for instance there is a publication of mid 16th century publication, of in French, of little (Quatranes? 34:25) from the bible, little versified ah, verses telling the story of the bible and they were illustrated by a French woodcutter of the middle 1550's called Bernard (Solomon? 34:34) a painter quite charming, but not one of the master spirits of the human race and there is a picture showing the meeting of Abraham and Melchesidec. It has nothing to do with the Surrender of Breda obviously, but it was a terrible shock when it was discovered 20 year ago to find that the most striking aspect of the Valazquez composition from which the picture in Spanish takes its name (____sky 34:58) and this meeting of two groups, that all this came directly - and the relation of the foreground groups against the receding background, all of his was a quotation. And that what Valazquez the supreme realist had done was not to paint life on the canvas but to modify art in the light of his own knowledge of life in the light of his own experience. But a modification of art nonetheless. And incidentally I can't go into it now but I'm particularly interested in Valazquez and it is possible to show there was not a painting by him that was not an elaborately deeply pondered synthetic contrast. And the look of absolute spontaneity and instantaneity is exactly what his art history creates. But it is not to be taken literally; in fact it is an insult.
Now what about Rubens? I want to point only to one feature in this painting by Rubens, and My Myers could you try to refocus the right hand machine, ID o think it is capable of a little better focus. Well perhaps not. No? alright thank you very much.
Well this is a picture unfortunately inaccessible to most of us, it is in Leningrad but it represents the Shrine of Ceres goddess of earth and agriculture and there are these (putti? 36:22) little cupid infants bringing up garlands of fruit and various produce off the earth. Now I was particularly interested in this fact about Rubens, that where (putti? 36:33) infants stringing garlands are a very common standard motif in the art of especially the 16th and 17th centuries, what is new in Rubens is this conception of the (putto 36:44) as an absolutely individualized little person. He is the first to give to the infant a real infant character. He never makes his little infants do things that they would not normally enjoy doing, I mean they never hold up enormous folio volumes or something proper to ponder and things like that see? So it is sort of fun to be a little child in a Rubens painting. And they are very distinctly children with personalities and it is the one on the extreme lower right who is, then you'll have to take my word for it, quite definitely modeled on Ruben's own children. His house, the picture was painted in 1614 and Ruben's own house was beginning to fill up with the children of his wife Isabella Brant and this is the family likeness. So there is no question that his individualization of the infant in painting is derived directly from the experience of life.
Now if I go on examining all these infants in turn, the next one is of course unidentifiable but the third, is without question (equitation? 38: 01) from a very famous antique and it is the little boy strangling a goose, which is here adapted. And then if you go up, then again you have two more who are only seen from the back. And then there is one seen in big profile from the left and there is the detail of it, and he too can be identified and it turns out that he is directly lifted from "The education of cupid" by Correggio a famous painting now in the London national gallery. But it was formerly in the possession of the Duke of Mantua in the early 1600's in whose service Rubens spent eight years while studying in Italy. So you have an extraordinary confession on the part of Rubens. The (putti 38:46) are disposed in a strangely geometric triangle, a perfect 60 and 30 degrees triangle, and at the three angles of this very regular triangle you have the three sources of Ruben's art, or for that matter Baroque art. Nature, The antique and the higher Renaissance, disposed with a kind of diagrammatic precision. Now this does not happen by accident and I think Rubens would have been disappointed as James Joyce would have been had you not caught onto his game after reading Ulysses and recognize that it had some connection with let's say (Homer? 39:17 ) and Shakespeare.
One of my greatest shocks is always to discover this kind of thing in Rembrandt. Now here is a painting by Rembrandt, it is a very gray slide unfortunately but it presents the angel leaving Tobias. The painting in the Louvre in Paris. And all of us marveled at the instantaneity and the spontaneity of the effect of the angel taking off into his natural habitat into the light while old (39:44 name) falls in humble awe upon his folded hands, Tobias looking up, the dog barking, two women cowering in the doorway. And then about a year ago I stumbled upon a woodcut by Martin van Heemskerck who is a respectable man but obviously again not one of the truly elect. And there you see that Martin van Heemskerck had found all the ingredients, although Rembrandt knows how to cook better than Heemskerck does, but all the ingredients are there and are transposed into a new picture.
Now if one does it in this sequence, going from the Rembrandt to discover its source it has something about like crime detection. It is as if you are catching the thief red-handed and this is not the effect I try to convey because it keeps on suggesting there is plagiarism involved whereas what I am suggesting is that what is involved is something of the essential nature of art.
Therefore I want to turn this the other way. Rembrandt would all of his life been familiar with renderings of say the return of Prodigal son. And there is a standard way that this was done as thousands of bible illustrations and separate engravings publishers brought cheap and sold as art, or as edification's to people of modest means, and this is always the prodigal son seen from the back kneeling before his father who will either place his hand around the boy's back, or the son actually collapsing into his father's bosom and then there are always to the right, two or three bystanders who function as a sort of Greek chorus. Now Rembrandt had seen these images, everybody in his time had seen them, and the difference between creative artist and a non artist is that the creative artist always looks at a work of art and treats it not as a consummate final experience but as the impulse to do something about it. And Rembrandt looks at it and says no, no, no this is not right, this is not his experience. The prodigal son's return this final moment of the atonement the at-one-meant of the son with the father has to be an experience far more private, darker, lonelier closer, and all he knows about life is enlisted into projecting this correction of the known prototype to adapt the type to his own personal experience, to put art as it were, here is the whole picture painted in his last year 1669, to put art where he thinks it ought to be, were he alone can put it. But it is art that is being changed. And Rembrandt always keeps close enough to the model to let you sense the span of transformation as all his contemporaries would have been able to do.
So this borrowing ceased to be surprising and it ceases to be surprising if it is recognized that art is not a representation or expression of something seen thought or felt. I repeat what I said a moment ago, it is not an expression of life but a modification of art in the light of life, in the light of something seen, thought or felt. But unless it is understood as a modification of art, something essential is missing. Hence you will find (Sussan 42:55?) saying the problem is to (42:57 french phrase) over from nature. The problem was not for (Sussan 42:59) to make simply convincing personalized statement about nature it is to put art where he feels it ought to be in view of his experience of nature, to (43:09 french phrase) over again. And then it ceases to be surprising to find in one of the most celebrated borrowings in the history of painting that Monet exactly one hundred years ago in this picture of (french title 43:20 ) disposed his three figures in the foreground, the two men conversing and the young lady exactly in the way in which Rafael's famous engraver, Marc Antonio Raimondi in a representation of the judgment of Paris had disposed the three river gods, the nymph in the lower right. Some people will refuse to believe that this is simply a transposition and will say no he must have seen his friends practicing on the grass that way, and all he did was to click the shutter of his camera. This is not how people paint. And as a matter of fact I can almost prove that it could not have been observed because the elbow of the nude lady in the foreground does not rest on her knee and in fact could not rest in that position at all. I have tried it. There is just nothing to hold it up. And Marc Antonio was in fact more realistic about it. But for purely aesthetic reasons, formal reasons, Monet wanted to bring the elbow forward. Anyhow when this was discovered the public was sort of outraged in Paris because they felt they had been had. Here was a piece of plagiarism. Monet was intensely surprised at their outrage. What was wrong with it? Because he knew enough about art to know that this was the nature of art. To make art over again in the light of an experience, to do it over from nature. And I must admit that I am still surprised to find that the most authoritative text today on Monet say in connection with this, "Indeed a curious lack of imagination repeatedly led Monet to borrow subjects from other artists."
See I am convinced in fact I know that Monet had no difficulty throwing out figures, sketching them, putting figures down in different positions, just go to a live class, and you will see people sitting around in various ways. But when artist quote like this it is the experience of something that already exists something that starts off being preexistent, therefore alien, perhaps resistant. Or recalcitrant, more recalcitrant than the figures they can toss off themselves and this motif that already exists has to be animated, infused with their life's breath. In other words art has to be made out of live art and they give to an artist's experience that greater creative energies are being summoned to transform a given antique into something living than simply to sketch out new figures directly from life. So that in some obscure way the (45:48 intercession?) of the art experience overlapping or crossing with the life experience is essential in the creation of all art.
Now, this experience, this dependence on an artistic model or this constant reference to artistic models is I think most surprising in the view of the portraiture because we tend to think of the portraiture of as being simply a matter of copying from a living model. We tend to define a portrait as a recognizable representation of a particular person. And let me now for the purposes of this argument speak of a portrait as the head or the bust. But the word portrait is actually ambiguous. A portrait is also a type of picture; it is a kind of object. It is not only a representation, a likeness of somebody; it is also a certain thing, a type of picture. Therefore a portrait would have to be defined also and I hope this doesn't sound unduly pedantic, a portrait would also have to be defined as a member of class of objects called portraits. A portrait is a member of a class of objects. You will see in a moment why I make so much of this piece of pedantry. As a class of objects, it immediately comes to mind that this class of objects did not always exist. It was for instance the Romans who first introduced the detached portrait head. The Greeks did not do it, except on coins. The Greeks made a portrait by giving the entire man and they would have thought there was something unnatural and pointless about decapitating a man for any purpose whatsoever, unless it were a criminal punishment, and this least one to realize that in fact the severed head is really quite an unnatural and fairly disagreeable experience, unless it is related to a class of objects called portraits. But if you don't know this class of objects, if there is no such class of object then you have no clue as to what you are seeing when you seeing simply a portrait head or a bust and ten you cannot see it as life, you would see it as evidence of mayhem.
Now the bust portrait is an extraordinary thing to find. The portrait is acceptable only as a recognizable repetition, or reenactment or rehearsal of an artistic type of a form. And so the bust portrait arises when it does arise in the early renaissance, after a long eclipse in the middle ages when there were no portraits really, it arises as a purposeful imitation of existing types to a very limited extent of Roman prototype but far more of reliquaries.
Can we have the one of the left also please? Yes.
Now the head on the left is a French 12th century reliquary head. That is to say where a church preserved the skull of a saint, it was not exposed bare, but then there would be a metal likeness or a head fashioned around it and the reliquary bust is in fact the origin of the portrait bust, so about the first that appears in the renaissance. It is by Donatello on the right, and it is the bust of the Saint (48:59 name) which Donatello made as a reliquary to contain the skull of Saint (49:04 name) when it was being translated to the cathedral of Pisa. And it is from this in fact there was an earlier one of wood which he modernized. And so what Donatello does in making a bust is to modernize, rejuvenate, recreate in his own manner, an existing type. And the great tradition of renaissance busts arises a quarter century later, as you see here, this insert comes from later in the 15th century, an imitation of reliquary busts. In other words it is not such a simple matter of saying a portrait is a likeness of a person. Here is the sitter and here is the artist making something and that's all there is to it. It is always done by means of representing first a type of representation. It is produced then in imitation of a class of objects as well a representation of the sitter.
So if this portrait on the left is a portrait of Lorenzo de Medici it is not simply that Lorenzo de Medici is it's subject, the real subject is the adaptation of Lorenzo de Medici to an existing type form and vice versa. The adaptation of an existing type form to the particular character of Lorenzo de Medici and the particular style or message of Donatello.
And thus now the bust portrait can enter the European tradition of art and ignore more and more life likeness, because it is assured of a firm anchorage in art, it is never in danger anymore of being mistake of decapitation. It is always a member of a class of objects, as well as a representation of a likeness.
Now in regards painting, the portrait emerges in the early Italian renaissance as pure profile which is a highly artificial form, and we know exactly that it emerges out of the rediscovery of ancient medals which are then remade as (50:49 __ ). We believe that the medal on the left is a self portrait, but he reintroduced that style of medals and portraits on medal into the early Renaissance around 1420 and 30, and then this painting by (51:02 __ la Francesca), a real portrait emerged around the middle of the 15th century in Italy and clearly an adaptation to a kind of portraiture already existing, they emerge in other words in imitation or as a reenactment of a type of art. And when it comes to a three quarter view which has developed in the North, I would like to suggest that here too there is not a direct representation of a sitter but what we are dealing with is an organic reinterpretation of a preexistent antique type form.
The imitation in this case is the imitation of those roman funerary monuments that lined all the ancient roads throughout ancient Europe and where Roman soldiers or Artisans were buried and then immortalized by finger portrait or by double or in this case a triple portrait it is a very beautiful one in Boston, and usually that is one hand showing, very often projecting over the parapet on which there was an inscription identifying the man.
Now the beginning of portraiture in the north rests in the generation of Jan van Eyck and in this painting of an unidentified sitter but apparently a musician, he may have been (52:07french term or name) the imitation is again of those works of art in which gains the most impressive precedent for giving immortality to the particular likeness of a person and this precedent was of course to be found in these Roman funerary busts.
So then again the portrait presents itself at its beginning and in this marvelous portrait of an old woman by (Giorgione 52:39) not merely as a representation of a particular sitter but as a member of a class of objects called portraits. And the man behind the parapet, this is of course is only one kind of portrait and each type of portrait will need a separate study but in this case the man behind the parapet is a man I fear was translated to another plane of existence. He has been translated by death or by immortal achievement, like the printer who was immortalized in a (53:07 __ by name___ )early 17th century French or he was imported to another plane of existence by a daydream like Rembrandt's own son Titus. Look at the picture of Titus at his desk. He is forgetting his lesson and he is just brooding or thinking and in his left hand he holds the leather capsule in which he keeps his writing implements and I would always shave though if ever there was a painting that was born out of an immediate visual experience and an immediate emotional experience, a certain tender response to seeing a small boy lost in a day dream, this was it.
But the pattern of, the pictorial pattern here is so closely, so irresistibly to that of the parapet portrait that I cannot believe it. And I must say that here too Rembrandt seeing his son recognized that it was depict able as a picture because a pictorial type existed and recognized that this pictorial type could be humanized, could be made over from nature by changing a stone parapet with its ( __lines and its __ into the __54:11-16 ) scratched up wood of a boy's desk.
There is one convention in portraiture, I hope that I may speak for about 10 minutes longer, is that alright? Thank you. There is one convention for portraiture which the 17th century liked even better than the parapet and that is the stone oval with a sitter behind it. And that too emerges needless to say from Roman precedence like that funerary monument in the Metropolitan museum in New York. And the engraved portrait on the right is by the foremost French portrait engraver of the reign of Louis the XIVth, (54:59 _name). I will show one or two one more of his.
And again the type form is now this type of portrait within a stone oval opening is interpreted as a real portrait behind the plane of the picture. In other words what we get here is an organic reinterpretation of what has come down in a monumental stone form in roman examples. And that we are to regard the sitter as a real person is made quite explicit in a great many of these oval portraits. For instance the Rembrandt on the right of this preacher who actually puts his hand out through the oval so that it casts a shadow upon the edge of it and on the thickness of the stone oval. Or, in this portrait by (55:47 name) later in the 17th century where the Sculptor was represented, here's his mallard and part of his cape coming out through the opening. So we are really are to interpret these as likeness of an individual person. That is the portrait in the first sense.
But something very extraordinary happened in these pictures. As they become more and more marvelously realistic and as their source in the antique prototype is unquestionably forgotten, the artist resorts to another means of anchoring their work in the experience of Art and in calling the spectator to a full consciousness of the process of art, even if the illusion is most compelling. For instance Rembrandt does not simply give you a man seen coming through a stone window. But on that same piece he gives you a bit of writing about the man separated from the rest of the picture only be a thin piece but the writing of the piece runs around the oval itself, so you know you are looking at a piece of paper and you see its visible transformation perpetually before your eyes from a flat piece of paper into the semblance of a stone that is pierced, light falling upon it, like a man coming through it. But what Rembrandt has done is he has made a work of extreme illusionism and then canceled out the illusionism by the self conscious display of a dream. Now I will return to this in a minute, but it seems to me by doing this, by drawing attention to the anomaly of a kind of 3 dimensional illusion he refers this image back to art. And this device of neutralizing the illusion by making illusion itself the subject of discussion becomes more and more standard in what is a perfectly realistic portrait of the time.
If you take the portrait by (name 57:43) again, on the left, is the portrait of a lady seen through a open oval window or is it perhaps the portrait in the second sense, a kind of object a number of a class of objects called a portrait, could it not rather be a medallion portrait hung up on a wall? In other words are we really seeing a person behind that window or are we seeing a picture of a person hung on a flat wall? In which of the two senses are we to interpret the word?
Or if you take this portrait of an Austrian count on the right, is this again as in the Rembrandt a real man coming through the window, he puts his hand on the lower ledge of it, or is it something that has been hung up by a metal ring at the top, it a medallion portrait. Here you really can't win because it is both one and the other and you get an extraordinary thing. You see at the same time a man and you see a class of object, a portrait of a man very realistically rendered and at the same time a flat thing, sort of the whole illusionist enterprise is suddenly placed as it were between inverted commas and you get this paradox. That at the moment where illusion is most completely mastered we are back at
End of recording 58:54

Publisher (Electronic Version)

Archives and Manuscripts Collections, The Baltimore Museum of Art;

Holding Institution

Baltimore Museum of Art;

Date Original

1963-03-24

Date Digital

2011

Type

Sound;

Format

Digital reproduction of one sound tape reel,

Source

Audiovisual Collection, AV.RR.01.A

Coverage (Time Period)

1961-1970;

Rights

Permission to reproduce this item is required and may be subject to copyright, fees, and other legal restrictions. For more information, please contact: E. Kirkbride Miller Art Research Library, Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, (443) 573-1778, bmalibrary@artbma.org